While Rabbi Farber’s study was not a large room, it accommodated the wedding party with ease. Besides the bridal couple and their parents, there were only Andrea’s grandmother, Mark’s brother Phil, his sister Linda, and Linda’s husband Jeff. Phil served as best man, Linda as maid of honor.
This last had been a happy inspiration. Andrea had been unable to think of anyone to stand up with her, and had begun to consider the propriety of asking her mother to act in that capacity. The one logical choice for the role, the inevitable selection a year or two ago, would have been Andrea’s closest friend at college, a girl named Winifred Welles. She had been close to Winkie as she had been close to no one before or since.
But after graduation they had let go of one another. They’d both gone to New York and it would have been easy to keep in touch, but somehow it was easier to lose contact, to let the past slip into the past. It was still hard to imagine going through a wedding without Winkie, but when she tried to picture Winkie beside her in the rabbi’s study or at the country club she could not manage it.
And there was no one in Buffalo to whom she felt similarly close. Then she learned that Linda and Jeff were timing their annual trip east to coincide with the wedding. She had known Linda in high school, and had been friendly if not intimate with her. And, although she had no secondary purpose in choosing Linda, the effect was not lost on Mrs. Benstock. “You picked up a lot of points with her,” Mark said. “Not that it makes any difference what she thinks.”
But it did make a difference, and she knew it. She would not be in the happy position of Jeff Gould, who had cleverly put three thousand miles between himself and his in-laws. And Mark, whether or not he took his parents seriously, was nevertheless close to them. Thus it seemed to her that being a good daughter-in-law was part of being a good wife.
The ceremony itself went off as smoothly as it had in rehearsal. They sipped wine from a goblet, which was then wrapped in a napkin and placed on the floor before them. Mark, grinning, stomped on it with authority, and the wedding party greeted this act with the spontaneous applause which had characterized every Jewish wedding she had ever attended.
The glass-breaking ritual was on a par with heaving glasses into a fireplace after drinking a significant toast. But Andrea had always regarded it as a metaphor for the rupture of the maidenhead. He stepped on the glass, she thought, and found it had already been broken.
They exchanged plain yellow gold bands, and despite the traditional jokes beforehand, neither ring was lost or dropped and both fit perfectly. It had surprised her at first that he had wanted to wear a wedding ring. The double ring ceremony had been his idea, and one that would never have occurred to her. But now she liked it, and as she placed the ring on his finger she came closer to crying than at any other stage in the ceremony.
Of course Rabbi Farber had a few words to say. No one paid much attention to what he said, and yet if he had omitted this obligatory rabbinical material the omission would have been noted and commented upon. “You would think Rabbi Mort might have said a few words. Everybody does it, it’s the custom.” So Rabbi Mort did indeed say a few words, touching upon the joy of exchanging nuptial vows in the presence of one’s family, and the importance in the modern world of affirming one’s heritage through a truly Jewish marriage ritual, and the role of religion as a third partner in a successful marriage. A cynic might have reflected that these remarks were perhaps more a commercial than a benediction. But no cynic was present.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.” “You may kiss the bride.” “Aren’t they an attractive couple?” “How I waited for this day, David.” “Andrea, you look beautiful, I love your dress.” “Well, you went and you did it, kid.”
Married.
The wedding reception was held at the Northlawn Country Club. The club was situated a dozen miles north and east of the city of Buffalo, and when it was founded in 1947 there was not a Jew residing within eight miles of the club grounds. There were, in fact, precious few people of any persuasion in the area; during the war years, sheep had grazed on what was to become the Northlawn golf course. The course, first laid out in 1948 and enlarged to eighteen holes three years later, had been designed by Daniel Johns Gregory. It was acknowledged to be one of the three best courses in western New York.
David Kleinman had not been a founding member of Northlawn. He had joined late in 1948, having waited a year to make sure that the club would get off the ground. There had been an attempt before the war to get a Jewish country club organized. It had failed for lack of support, and several of the sponsors had lost money. After a little over a year he judged the club to be a sound operation which filled a genuine community need. And the public golf courses were getting impossibly overcrowded. He’d played at Delaware and Grover Cleveland during the war, but now there were constant waiting lines at both courses, and the maintenance was not what it had been. So he had joined, thinking of the club as an organization worthy of his support and a place to play golf on Wednesdays and Saturdays. That it would turn out to be a focal point of his social life had surely never occurred to him. Twice the nominating committee had sounded him out for the club presidency and on both occasions he pleaded the pressure of work. “I don’t need the aggravation,” he told his wife. “Let the operators have it. They want me because I’m not an operator, and that’s just why I don’t want it.”
Harry Benstock was not a member of the Northlawn, and because of this Bea Kleinman had suggested that it might be diplomatic to hold the reception elsewhere. “Now I can’t see that at all,” her husband said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I was thinking that they might resent it.”
“I don’t agree, but suppose they did? We do our entertaining at the club. We’re going to have to entertain Harry and Ruth a certain amount of the time.”
“Not too often, I hope.”
“Not too often, no, but from time to time. So we might as well get everything out in the open at the beginning. Besides, what makes you think Harry doesn’t like to go to the club? Since she started going with Mark I made a point of noticing, and Harry’s out there whenever somebody invites him.”
“But he doesn’t belong.”
“He doesn’t and he won’t. His name was put up in, I don’t know, say 1950. And he was voted down.”
“You never told me why.”
“I didn’t vote against him, so I suppose I don’t know why. Except that I do know why. Harry made his money during the war, which is no crime, but he made it because Harry was the one guy who could get you a car when nobody else could. He had a Pontiac agency like a dozen other people, but if you wanted a ’42 Pontiac when nobody had them, you could get it through Harry. You paid him cash and you didn’t pick up the car at his lot. It was delivered to you at your home. And you paid a lot more than list price, and it was all tax free, and that was how Harry made his money. And in 1950 it was enough to keep him out of Northlawn.”
“I heard something about that but I never paid close attention.”
“Well, other people did. There were enough founding members who bought cars from Harry, paying him under the table, and it’s my guess that they were the ones who voted against him. The funny thing is if Harry applied now he would get in with no trouble whatsoever. There was one man who said Harry Benstock would get in over his dead body, but he died two and a half years ago, so it would be over his dead body after all. I won’t mention a name.”
“I know who you mean.”
“Of course you do. Anyway, Harry could get in. But his name was put up the once and he never had it submitted a second time. He says he doesn’t play golf so what does he need with it, but how many members do you know who don’t play golf? Harry would want to be a member except for getting rejected once. Not to mince words, he’s a climber. He was a member of B’nai Zion for how many years, and then he switched to Beth Sholom just so his kids could be confirmed there. Not that he was the only one to do that little thing.”